While it may not be as technically elegant as using lisp, it greatly increases the count of folks who can contribute and simplifies the code with a single language for both front and back.
Secondly, while, in general terms, JavaScript is not as performant as Java or C++, for asynchronous real time operations, such as mostly used by this application, the event loop in node, a layer over io_uring, is a highly highly efficient method to perform these.
In other words, we get to trade simplicity for raw performance to ease maintainability, and less complex code means less security risk and bugs. In fact, the bottleneck in this application for performance is not JavaScript but network link latency, and the browser and the hardware that runs on.
While it may not be as technically elegant as using lisp, it greatly increases the count of folks who can contribute and simplifies the code with a single language for both front and back.
Secondly, while, in general terms, JavaScript is not as performant as Java or C++, for asynchronous real time operations, such as mostly used by this application, the event loop in node, a layer over io_uring, is a highly highly efficient method to perform these.
In other words, we get to trade simplicity for raw performance to ease maintainability, and less complex code means less security risk and bugs. In fact, the bottleneck in this application for performance is not JavaScript but network link latency, and the browser and the hardware that runs on.